2865 Search results for "media"

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca_vv6urOCY Just last week, I stumbled upon a movie trailer on YouTube that really caught my attention.  The independent film, Precious, tells the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, a Harlem-bred, morbidly obese, pregnant, HIV-positive, illiterate, junior high school student who struggles with low self-esteem.  If that isn’t already an earful, Precious’ story is further complicated […]

This week, I am going to feature a blog I wrote for Document the Silence which is a website I co-founded dedicated to ending violence against women of color. Right now, we are in the midst of mounting a national online media campaign to document how domestic violence and the family court system work in […]

      President Barack Obama has a knack for quelling folk’s fears through rhetoric. When his opponents said he was inexperienced, he countered them by characterizing himself as the “fresh air” Washington needed after being pillaged by Beltway insiders. When Black folks questioned his Blackness, he adopted a more homiletic tone in some of his […]

Let’s face it, no one wants to sit around with the President, Joe Biden, Skip Gates, and some random police officer–with “diversity” training–drinking beer and pretending to talk about race. Sure, it’s a (free?) trip to the White House and all, but I don’t want to explain to Joe Biden what I mean by calling […]

         Race is a social construct that has historically been used as a means to stratify cohort groups. But what happens when an individual who feels they transcend it shakes up the paradigm? Professor Henry Louis Gates, one of the foremost scholars on African-American studies has spent a lifetime researching and redefining [...]

Last Friday (July 24), author E. Lynn Harris died. Though his passing is getting some attention, by comparison, the deaths of other, more famous people have peppered the mainstream media at a much higher rate. A lot of folks (still) don’t know who he is. Either way, learning of his death gave me pause. Not […]

For decades Detroit has been the center of the automotive industry in the United States, and was the destination of many black migrants in the early 50’s and 60’s. The factories provided jobs that allowed black men and women with little education to pay for their families in sustainable and even upwardly mobile ways. As […]

Beginning today and every third Friday to follow, I will blog vignettes of weekly news stories. This type of vignette blogging will allow people to comment on the story or stories that most affect them. So, for a blogger who delights in blogging about current events, race, and gender this has been as the cliché […]

A few years ago, when I was still taking graduate school course work, I got into a “disagreement” with a colleague about race and class. We had just left our course on mid-20th century black literature, and were hanging out in the department lounge for some strange reason–something I’d never do now. I think we […]

We are only moments away from the confirmation of the first Latina Supreme Court Justice and months into the first tenure of America’s first black President and I’ve become a bit inundated by Facebook fan pages, tweets, yahoo groups, swelling crowds, celebrating feminists, hardcore nationalists, just groups in general.  Hell, I’m exhausted. This isn’t to […]

till v. – to labor, as by plowing or harrowing, upon (land) for the raising of crops; cultivate. n. – a drawer, box, or the like, as in a shop or bank, in which money is kept I’ve been thinking about death a lot this year, both personally, with the death of my beloved great-grandmother, […]

  As a youngster my father always told me to never make excuses. He stressed that habitual “excuse making” leads to defeatism. He spoke of defeatism so pejoratively that I began to think it was some sort of plague. When he even uttered the word excuse his face would contort in an ugly cringe as […]